Vikram Sakhuja: "Madison is an incredibly exciting and valuable asset"

Currently enjoying gardening leave, Vikram Sakhuja, GroupM's former global strategic development officer, is all set to join Sam Balsara’s Madison Media Group as equity partner and Group CEO, next month. Edited Excerpts from an interview with the media veteran.

Edited Excerpts

It’s a lovely fallow period, a semi-retirement life almost. I’ve never had a punctuation mark like this (he has nearly 30 years of industry experience). I’m getting time to chill, catch up with friends and family, think about life, read, re-energise. I was told I must travel, but I’ve travelled so much over the last three years; I’m enjoying being at home.

I don’t plan my career that much. I go with the flow. I am a reasonably lazy, inertia-driven guy. So if I’m in a job, I pretty much stay there.

Global jobs, by definition, especially in large companies, are a little slow; there’s a lot of alignment that is required, large number of meetings... progress is slower than you’d like. I was a bit impatient, from that standpoint. If I had to come back to India, I knew I wanted to stay on in the media space, but I really didn’t know what the opening that could get me back could be. Equity was one. So when Sam made the offer, it sounded good.

I was in New York (he moved there around December 2013, after running the show as global CEO of Maxus from Mumbai for a year) and was all set to move to London (in October 2014 as head of GroupM’s global strategic development). Though it went as far as calling the movers and packers, it didn’t happen. This offer came and I found it more exciting. I thought, 'Okay, instead of going to London, let’s come back to Mumbai’ (he came back to Mumbai in May this year).

When it comes to startups, there’s a lot of romance but there’s also a lot of hard work. I don’t think I would’ve had the energy or the smarts to start from scratch. I’d rather come in as an investor and support somebody else’s idea. A lot of people I admire are doing it, like Google’s Rajan Anandan and WPP’s Ranjan Kapur.

Also, as an entrepreneur you have to do just about everything - the admin stuff, sales, strategic stuff, even taking out the garbage! Right now, I feel I’d rather take something big and try to make it bigger, and create value out of that. Madison is an incredibly exciting and valuable asset. The chance to actually shape it, and in some way to be able to call it my own - it was a no brainer.

When I joined GroupM (early 2000s) it was a start up, one with a huge amount of resource available to it. We didn’t have equity the way we’re talking about it right now, but we ran it like our own shop and created some serious value. Regardless of which company you’re in, the onus is on you to bring about a huge amount of value. Value creation, by definition, is a given.

The best way of measuring value today is - if somebody had to buy you out, what’s the value of your shares? From a valuation standpoint, I don’t think my entering Madison alone is going to make a difference; we’ll have to do something good and start signalling greater value. I am confident we can do that.

Well, I am not coming in with pressure but the sense I get is - in a profit-oriented company like WPP, where I’ve spent 14 years - or even at the Cokes and the P&Gs prior to that -there’s ongoing pressure, from the global management, to deliver numbers. The sense I get from Indian companies is - there isn’t as much emphasis on the whole 'target’ thing. That’s more of a 'global phenomenon’ than it is a 'local entrepreneur phenomenon’.

When I was at Coke, the company had just bought out Parle (beverages). The Chauhans were doing very well, but it was more about how much the company is servicing the market and how much natural growth is being tapped, than about the whole 'target’ thing. Whereas, the Coke system was about growth, growth, growth...

We’ll have to see how it is at Madison. If anything, I might bring in the culture of setting ambitious targets and trying to achieve them.

The first stark difference is in the adoption of digital platforms. There, an average of 25 per cent of media money goes into digital, compared to less than 10 in India. Marketers there have embraced platforms like Facebook, Instagram, social listening and search. Search has plateaued there and is even declining in some places, but is still growing in India.

Programmatic planning is another big thing there. I don’t see people talking about it here, quite as much. It’s about moving from 'placement of media’ to 'machine led media’ or 'algorithm led media’. That is, buying media impressions on the back of algorithms. This automates all the IP data that you leave behind on your trail; people are targeted through that, as opposed to saying, 'I’ll take the front page solus on The Times of India’ or 'I’ll take this spot on Star Plus’ or 'I’ll take the front page banner on Yahoo’.

Another difference is in the area of marketing ROI; focus on the contribution of media to the topline of a business is way more there than it is here. I see a lot of it in the US and, to some extent, in European markets like Spain, the Netherlands and Germany to a lesser extent.

'Attribution’ is another thing people are talking about more outside India. It’s about the role different sites/assets (like Google, Facebook, your own homepage, random YouTube content) play in the final outcome. For instance, the Google guys may say, '70 per cent of the penultimate clicks, before you go onto any website or before you make an e-commerce transaction, are ours because you go to the final destination through Google’. But attribution looks at the entire chain of movements that a web user makes. It looks at the way he/she navigates the web, in general.

I was recently chairing a jury for an industry awards show. While there was some fantastic use of native content, video content, Facebook targeting, gaming and contests, I saw a singular lack of data and social commerce. The lack of social commerce was surprising because there’s so much e-com happening here. And I was disappointed to see the lack of data-led cases.

There’s a need for a data strategy, for agencies and clients. To collect data, you need to have 'ad serving’. It starts with first party data, that is, data of your own assets - capturing the number of people visiting your website/YouTube channel/Facebook page/e-commerce platform. You also need third party data, which you have to, typically, buy. Many agencies are shy of making this investment because they don’t know whether they can recover the cost.

When these are strung together, you can make magic out of that data. I’ll say it’s an opportunity lost at this point in time. I don’t stress about it but it’s something that we should get into.

I champion media agnosticity. I want a common currency to evaluate media impressions on TV, radio, online, print and outdoor. Right now, on TV you’re buying space on a cost per rating point (CPRP) basis, on radio you’re buying on a cost per spot basis, on print you’re buying on a cost per sq cm basis, on the web you’re buying on a CPM basis (Cost Per Mille), on outdoor you’re buying on a cost per site basis... I don’t know why we’re complicating matters. A lot of people are doing it as they’re insecure about their turf.

As the number of media touch-points increases, it makes sense to have one language across all. A common metric that unites them all is cost per thousand impressions (CPT). Within that you can break up an impression by reach and frequency.

The 'broadcast’ nature of India is going to change into a more targeted, almost market-led approach. In India, for a national brand, we make one pan-HSM campaign, one more for the four southern states, another with a bit of regional flavour added... truth be told, we have five to six media plans for every campaign. I used to tell my counterparts in Europe that Europe is like India. In Europe, you make different plans for France, Spain, Portugal and Italy.

As we move forward, India’s media plans will become more Europe-like, that is, you’ll have the ability to go state by state, city by city and market by market. If a detergent brand has a strong hold in, say, Western UP, why should that brand have to take the entire HSM market? The brand is wasting media if it is present in places where it is not being distributed. Media, accelerated by digital, is allowing us to go as local as we want to.

Digital allows you to target the same piece of inventory differently at different consumers. For example, an ad on Yahoo’s homepage can target a cosmetics brand at you and a car brand at me through the same inventory. On TV too, it is possible to do that, by breaking up a signal. If you have data at the base of it, you can micro-target and move towards targeting a billion, one at a time. The differences between broadcast media and CRM/B2B marketing will blur.

No, I think exporting talent is a virtue. The Indian management ethos and work ethic is superior (to that in the West). I don’t think the full potential of India is tapped. That could be because people who’re heading global organisations don’t know that much about India. We need ambassadors for India abroad.

I feel very proud when Indians go abroad and do well there. Their payback is very profound. So from that standpoint, I don’t agree with you about the trajectory of 'losing’ talent. If people can get more growth outside, there’s nothing wrong.

Take my example. My ability to navigate the digital landscape has increased over the past three years. I’m able to add more value having gone out and come back. I can see the future a bit more clearly now, than I would’ve been able to had I been a frog only in this well.

My priority is going to be existing business. To see what shape it is in; and I expect it to be in great shape. Not to say that new business is not important. It is.

Currently, I am sure Madison needs a good telecom business. Which one it’s going to be, I don’t know. I would like to believe a lot of telecom operators see a great potential partner in Madison. It’s a great team; I would envy it from the other side, when I was at GroupM.